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 exploited, and bring about social reforms. Keynes clearly showed how Wilson has proved a simpleton and how all his illusions have gone to the winds, as soon as they came in contact with the actual businesslike policy of capital in the person of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The working masses guided by their own life experience see more and more clearly that the „roots“ of the Wilson policy are nothing but clerical humbug, middle class phraseology and utter incomprehension of the class struggle, while the learned pedants could have learnt the same thing even from the book of Keynes.

All this leads to two inevitable conclusions, two fundadamentalfundamental [sic] propositions: on the one hand the privation and the ruination of the masses have increased incredibly. This refers above all to the one and a quarter billions of people i. e. 70% of the population of the earth. These are the countries whose population is dependent, juridically deprived of all rights, and whose „mandates“ have been given to some financial brigands. Besides thissthis [sic], the enslavement of the defeated countries has been established by the Versailles treaty, and by those secret treaties with regard to Russia, which stipulate that we owe them so many thousands of millions. The latter treaties, it is true, are sometimes worth no more than the paper they are written on. The above represents the first time in the history of the world, when the plunder, dependence, slavery, poverty and starvation of a billion and a quarter of people has been set up as a legalised thing.

On the other hand the workers of each of the victorious countries have got into an unbearable position. All capitalist contradictions have become unusually acute as a result of the war. And this furnishes the ferment for the profound revolutionary movement which is constantly growing. For during the war people have been put under military discipline, sent to death, or menaced with immediate military punishment. War conditions made it impossible to examine economic reality. Writers, poets, priests and all the press have devoted themselves only to apologising for the war. Now when the war is over the exposure begins. German imperialism was exposed by the Brest-Litovsk peace. Likewise the veil was taken off the Versailles peace, which was to have been a victory for imperialism, but has proved its defeat. The Keynes case shows among other things, how tens and hundreds of thousands of people from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, from the intellectuals